On September 17, 2012 a court document filed by Congress in a federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) case contained what is documented as an anti-gay lie.
Here is what is involved.
A hoax study on same-sex parenting funded by anti-gay-rights extremists and carried out by Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin is being used as a weapon in Speaker John Boehner‘s court filings, perversely to argue that the so-called Defense of Marriage Act is constitutional.
Officially, the House of Representatives entity making the DOMA filings is called “The Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group” (BLAG).
That name is hogwash; only the Republican members want to defend DOMA.
In the most recent BLAGÂ filing in Windsor versus the United States, the Republican gay-bashers allege this:
“Although Ms. Windsor elsewhere stresses the supposed need for expert witnesses to present scientific evidence, she attacks the published Regnerus study by relying on a blog posting, Windsor Br. 49 n.23— the lack of scientific rigor of which is apparent simply from reading it.”
Meanwhile in the documented reality of the prior Windsor court filing that BLAG/Boehner cites there, Windsor’s attorneys referenced both a post on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website, and an amicus brief filed by 8 major professional associations including the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association.
That amicus brief filed by 8 major professional association analyzes the unsound methodology of the Regnerus study with plenty of scientific rigor, so one can see why Boehner & Co. would lie by saying that Windsor only refuted Regnerus by means of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog post.
Moreover, Windsor’s attorneys noted that the Chronicle’s blog post reported on various unspecified conflicts of interest with the Regnerus study’s peer reviewers.
As turned out, those conflicts of interest involve Regnerus’s chief funder sitting on the editorial board of the journal that published the Regnerus study.
The bottom line here is that the House General Counsel is using tax payer money to file court documents that contain documentable anti-gay lies.
Windsor’s attorneys did not only rely on a blog post to refute Regnerus, as BLAG claims. They also cited the American Medical Association’s brief, which analyzes the Regnerus study as scientifically unsound.
New York City-based novelist and freelance writer Scott Rose’s LGBT-interest by-line has appeared on Advocate.com, PoliticusUSA.com, The New York Blade, Queerty.com, Girlfriends and in numerous additional venues. Among his other interests are the arts, boating and yachting, wine and food, travel, poker and dogs. His “Mr. David Cooper’s Happy Suicide†is about a New York City advertising executive assigned to a condom account.